It's been nearly 250 years since Benjamin Franklin wrote that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. I add to that that we can all expect laundry, and surprises. If surprises aren't coming in your genealogy search, you might be doing it wrong (tongue firmly in cheek).
Last week's surprise may not have been a huge deal, but it did lead me down the proverbial rabbit hole to try to document the lives of three of my Gramps' 1st cousins. The three of these siblings were all born within just a few years of Gramps in the same neck of the woods in Pulaski County, Illinois, but when the cousins were very small, they had moved to busy St. Louis.
In writing about the middle sibling Henry last week, I believe I only mentioned his sisters briefly (runs to look). Grace Lillian Chamberlain was born in November 1896, six months after her parents' marriage. As a 4-year-old in the 1900 Census, she is listed as Grace, but spent the majority of her life as "Lillian." She is fairly easy to follow through years of records, and lived with her husband and daughter in Kentucky, eventually moving to the Carolinas. Her daughter Elizabeth does not appear to have married or had any children, so like Henry, that line is now extinct.
Minnie Elizabeth was born on an unknown date in 1901. She is not nearly as cooperative at appearing in the records, but down that rabbit hole, there were a few surprises. At age five, she wanders from her maternal aunt and uncle's home with Henry and is found sleeping in the doorway of a St. Louis theater. When Henry is living with Dad in Arkansas in 1910, the girls and their mother are nowhere to be found. I could assume that the three of them were together, but prefer to keep looking.
In 1915, a Minnie Chamberlain, age 14 and born in Illinois, appears in Sioux City, Iowa as an inmate at the Convent of the Good Shepherd. She is working as a laundress. She is still in residence there in 1920, although she has reached the age of majority (I think - it may have been 21 in those days). She may have had no where else to go, I am still looking for Lillian and their mother had remarried and was living in rural Missouri with her much younger husband, Lonie. Had Minnie done something to be judged the equivalent of a juvenile delinquent? Had she been housed as an orphan? Regardless of how she came to be in western Iowa, she appears there a 3rd time in late 1922, on a birth certificate for baby girl Chamberlain, with all of the information for father entered repeatedly as "unknown."
In 1927, Minnie appears back in St. Louis in a single newspaper article. She was working as a dancer and had been caught in a significant theft of her employer. The same article reports she has left her husband behind in Illinois, but declines to state WHERE in Illinois and does not clarify what her penalty is for this theft. A short time later, for the 1930 Census, Henry is out of state and Minnie and Lillian "missing."
However, what I have found in 1930 is their mother May, her husband Lonnie, and a 7-year-old whose relationship is not noted. My wonderful Cuzzin can tell you how eager I am when it comes to surprises, and it took me approximately an hour to follow THIS new trail and find that this young girl had an extremely similar name AND the same birthdate as that baby born in 1922 Iowa. I've withheld her name and date of birth, but my working theory based on all of the facts and the available information on her adulthood, is that this 7-year-old little girl was the daughter of Minnie and her young step-father, only 7 years her senior. However, this woman appears to be still living, just 101 years old.
Minnie, of course, is long deceased. At least by about twenty years, if her longevity reached anything similar to her daughter's. Despite the fact that she is listed as Mrs. Montgomery in her parent's obituaries in the mid-1940's, her location is missing, and I have no further information on her. What I do have is the information that my Gramp's cousin was a flapper or perhaps burlesque dancer in the same city and at the same time as Josephine Baker was taking flight on an international career (they'd even been small children in the same neighborhood)!
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